I found it interesting that when writing about the communities ‘Below Bear Mountain’ in his book of the same name, that the late Eugene Burmeister completely avoids or ignores the community of DiGiorgio. He writes at some length regarding Rockpile School and Joseph DiGiorgio’s donation of $150,000 in cash and 40 acres of land to the district on Christmas Eve 1945. He also notes that in early 1946 the Kern County Board of Supervisors changed the name of the district to DiGiorgio. There is nothing more on the community that existed at Comanche and DiGiorgio Roads.
All of us who lived in the area remember the grand house, the employee housing, the grounds, and the persimmon trees. We also recall the post office and the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. So, if you have the down low on that part of our local history, we are looking and would appreciate information. I know there were local politics with regard to the tamarisk line and some other things, but I’d like to print the history of the community not the history of one company. If you have a text you can identify or can offer personal information send it along to webmaster@silvertips.org
I am posting this text in its entirety. It was found in a business journal by SilverTips President James 'Weasel' Williams and sent in last month. It has taken several hours to retype the text so it could be placed here. If the paragraphs are off, accept my apologies in advance.
Di Giorgio Corporation Company History:
Once a vast fruit-growing empire that owned almost 50 square miles
of California and Florida farmland, the Di Giorgio Corp. became a
conglomerate in the 1980s and, following a takeover and
restructuring in the early 1990s, emerged as a distributor of food
products. Di Giorgio distributes a variety of grocery products under
the White Rose brand name, primarily to the tri-state region of New
York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
The founder of the company, Giuseppe Di Giorgio, was born in
Cephalous, Sicily, in 1874. One of nine children born to a
small-scale vineyard owner and lemon grower, he arrived in New York
in 1888. After a few years working for a fruit jobber, the young
man--now Joseph Di Giorgio--moved to Baltimore and became a
middleman himself. Borrowing money from a bank, he founded the
Baltimore Fruit Exchange in 1904. Eventually he was to have a
controlling interest in the Baltimore, New York, and Pittsburgh
fruit exchanges. In 1911 he bought the Earl Fruit Co., a
well-established California shipper.
Di Giorgio became a grower in 1918, when he started to acquire land
in Florida for growing citrus fruits. A year later he bought 5,845
acres of land north of Arvin in California's southern San Joaquin
Valley for about $90 an acre. This was arid, saline scrubland, but
its owner, who established the Di Giorgio Fruit Co. in 1920,
obtained water by drilling wells hundreds of feet deep with powerful
electric pumps and began to plant trees and vines to grow apricots,
grapes, and peaches. By 1929 the company had the largest
fruit-packing plant in the nation. A branch railway line serving
Arvin was built to provide shipping facilities for Di Giorgio and
other fruit growers.
The end of prohibition in 1933 enabled Di Giorgio Fruit to expand grape production, and it took a sizable equity position in California wineries, including its own Del Vista Wine Co. By 1946 Di Giorgio Fruit occupied about 33 square miles in the San Joaquin Valley and was the largest grape, plum, and pear grower in the world. It was also the second largest producer of wine in the United States. Other crops grown there included potatoes and asparagus.
The company also held thousands more acres in the state, as far north as Marysville (north of Sacramento) and as far south as the Borrego Valley, near the Mexican border. In addition, the company held about 14 square miles of land in Florida and was the largest producer of citrus fruit in that state. Non-growing income (about ten percent of the total) came from dividends from the fruit exchanges and minority interests in other fruit auction companies, returns as a packer, loader, and commission merchant, an Oregon lumber and box facility, and the winery.
The corporation's annual revenue rose from $5.7
million in 1938 to $18.2 million in 1946. In the latter year, Joseph
Di Giorgio and other family members owned 59 percent of the
corporation's common stock and a controlling portion of the
cumulative preferred stock. However, this vast farm empire began to
experience dramatic setbacks over the next 20 years. In the late
1930s and early 1940s the water table under the major portion of Di
Giorgio's California properties sunk about 150 feet. To survive, the
operation needed federal irrigation water but was disqualified by
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which restricted its services to
individual recipients who owned less than 160 acres--a limit Joseph
Di Giorgio referred to as a Bolshevist measure.
Labor unrest also played a part in Di Giorgio's struggles. The
corporation withstood a 1947-50 strike aimed at union recognition
for its farm workers, but in 1966 the company signed a contract with
Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Prior to
the settlement, civil rights activists had organized a boycott of Di
Giorgio grapes and other products.
Joseph Di Giorgio died in 1951. Among his four nephews in high-level
management, Robert Di Giorgio eventually came to the fore. A
graduate of Lawrenceville School, Yale University, and Fordham Law
School, Robert Di Giorgio's ambitions and management style
contrasted sharply to those of his uncle. Under the leadership of
Robert Di Giorgio, who became president in 1962, the corporation
increased the nonagricultural portion of its business from 15
percent in 1955 to 87 percent in 1964 and to over 98 percent in
1967. "Fruit" was dropped from the company name in 1964, the year
its annual report described Di Giorgio as a "publicly held, profit
oriented processor, distributor and marketer of foods." The Florida
citrus holdings were sold in 1972, and by 1976 Di Giorgio owned only
2,500 acres of farmland, in the Marysville area, which was soon sold
in 1978. Another 6,000 acres of land in the Borrego Valley was
retained for nonagricultural development.
During this time, the company began to diversify its interests, and
by the late 1960s the Di Giorgio Corp. controlled 15 non-farming
subsidiaries. In the late 1950s Di Giorgio had acquired S&W Fine
Foods, TreeSweet Products, and the White Rose food distribution
business in greater New York. Serv-A-Portion, purchased in 1967,
packaged packets of sugar, mustard, ketchup, and other condiments
for use by fast-food businesses and institutional cafeterias. Los
Angeles Drugs (LAD), acquired in 1968, distributed drugs,
pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics in southern California. Peter
Carando, Inc., also bought in 1968, processed Italian-style meats in
New England. Acquired in 1969, Las Plumas Lumber Co. raised the
company's stake in West Coast timber production.
Di Giorgio's activities also included land development for shopping
centers, condominium apartments, recreational areas, and mobile home
parks. Investments and directorships tied the company to such
powerful California enterprises as the Bank of America, Pacific Gas
and Electric, and Southern California Edison. Assets reached $82.9
million in 1965, while sales passed $100 million, ranking Di Giorgio
ninth in rate of sales growth among the nation's 500 leading
corporations. Robert Di Giorgio moved up from president to
chairperson in 1971, while also remaining chief executive officer.
By this time the company's White Rose subsidiary was
the largest independent wholesale-grocery distributor in the greater
New York area. TreeSweet was processing and marketing citrus juices
in Europe as well as the United States, while the Serv-A-Portion
subsidiary marketed small containers of jams, jellies, and sugar in
Europe. An international subsidiary bottled Sunland juice products
in Belgium for distribution in European supermarkets and food
stores, and DG Leisure Products was building and distributing
campers and travel trailers made by Di Giorgio factories in
California and Michigan. A California subsidiary was making machines
used in peach canneries to extract pits. Precut housing components
and wood chips were being exported to Japan from sawmills in the
Pacific Northwest.
Like many other conglomerates of that era, Di Giorgio eventually
proved to have taken on more than it could handle. After the
national economy fell into recession in late 1973, the company
suffered its first loss in 1974 since the 1930s, $3.1 million.
Corporate earnings totaled $24.8 million in 1975, but $9.6 million
was paid out in interest on the corporation's heavy debt, which
included $70 million in long-term debt. Net earnings for the year
came to only $630,000.
By 1979 Di Giorgio's annual sales were approaching $1 billion. However, a reviewer in the New York Times article described Di Giorgio as "an association of marketing men looking for something to sell," meaning that the company still lacked focus. "We went into a rush program of acquisitions," Robert Di Giorgio later conceded, observing that "when you do that, you make some very good ones and some bad ones. Fortunately, there were more good ones than bad ones, but we made some mistakes." These mistakes included money-losing units that manufactured plastic tableware and wrought-iron and aluminum furniture.
As a result, the corporation sold off peripheral businesses, including the sawmills and recreational vehicles, reducing its subsidiaries from 28 to 18. Of the company's 1978 revenue of $897.1 million, 44 percent came from the corporation's building materials division, 32 percent from the food distribution division (which included drugs), 14 percent from the food processing division, and ten percent from automotive accessories. Among the company's problems, according to some analysts, was uncertainty over its future course. In 1980, as Robert Di Giorgio approached his seventieth birthday, investors (disappointed with the corporation's overall earnings of only $11 million on sales of $1 billion) wondered if a successor would be able to rein in the 15 powerful divisional presidents.
Allowed great autonomy under Di Giorgio, most of them had been owners of the acquired businesses they continued to manage. In some cases they had sold their businesses for Di Giorgio stock and had thus become large shareholders. Di Giorgio stepped down as chairperson in 1982 and was succeeded by Peter Scott, who also remained president. However, Di Giorgio remained to chair the board's executive committee.
In 1983 Di Giorgio's building materials sector opened
two new facilities, a California plant for precut, preassembled
lumber, and a Denver facility for extruding aluminum used in doors,
windows, and panels. White Rose continued to be the company's most
profitable unit, while Allied Distributing Co., a distributor of
electronics products, was reported to have invested too heavily in
the glutted video game market. Also during this time, a major luxury
resort development in Borrego Springs overseen by Di Giorgio began
operations.
A restructuring program was adopted in 1984, a year in which the
corporation's stock fell 98 cents a share. Sun Aire, a California
commuter airliner, was sold to Skywest Airlines. Also sold that year
were TreeSweet, Allied, and real estate, other than Borrego Springs
previously held for development. By August 1985 Di Giorgio's was
profitable again, and its stock had rebounded from a low of under
$10 a share in late 1984 to more than $16 a share.
The following year the Los Angeles Drug Co. (LAD) was sold for about $40 million. Would-be corporate raiders started putting Di Giorgio "in play" during 1986. First, Kane-Miller Corp. acquired a 9.4 percent stake in the company but then backed off and sold some of those shares. Later in the year, Mario Gabelli raised his holdings to 11.2 percent of the stock. Although Gabelli initially denied that he would attempt to take over Di Giorgio, he did remark that food companies were prone to buyouts because of undervalued assets and attractive cash flow.
By September, the company's stock had risen to $25 a share. By July 1987 Gabelli Group Inc. owned 28.6 percent of Di Giorgio's common stock, which had reached $31 a share. After two partnerships related to the Gabelli Group made an unsolicited $238 million leveraged buyout offer for Di Giorgio, the company management adopted a "poison pill" defense. Under this plan, each share was issued the right, in the event of a takeover or merger, to be exchanged for twice its value in the stock of the surviving company. In addition, shareholders not belonging to a person or group holding 30 percent of the common stock received the right to buy company shares at half price.
In early 1988 Di Giorgio enacted a $70 million, $21-a-share buyback
offer, ultimately buying about 41 percent of the outstanding shares.
To help pay for the buyback, the management sold five divisions,
including Serv-A-Portion, the Belgium-based international food
processing subsidiary, an aluminum products division, and the land
development unit. These transactions brought in $122 million and
left Di Giorgio to focus on two lines of business: food processing
and distribution and building materials.
New Jersey native Arthur M. Goldberg became, in February 1989, the
fourth investor in less than three years to buy more than five
percent of Di Giorgio's stock and seek control. Goldberg had
previously attempted to take over Di Giorgio in 1984 but had sold
his stock when the price rose. A former trial lawyer and an active
investor in medium-sized companies, Goldberg had a history of taking
quick profits, sometimes in the form of "greenmail," the name given
to a company buyback of a raider's shares at a premium price.
Goldberg's investments reportedly had earned $80 million for himself
and his partners. He denied being only interested in speculative
profits, however, telling a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, "I've
tried to always build companies, rather than tear them down.... In
all the situations I've been in, all the stockholders have done
very, very well."
Di Giorgio's management rejected a $30-a-share offer from Goldberg
in June 1989. He owned 13 percent of the corporation's stock in
August, when he made a tender offer of $32 a share to the
stockholders, which was reduced to $30 a share in December. The bid,
estimated to be worth $154 million, was managed by New York's
Bankers Trust Co., which stood to gain as much as $10 million by
providing a bridge loan, underwriting the subordinated debt, and
handling the sale of some of Di Giorgio's units. By the end of the
year Goldberg's DIG Acquisition Corp., a unit of Rose Partners L.P.,
in which he was the only general partner, held or had been tendered
at least 75 percent of Di Giorgio's shares.
Goldberg took control of Di Giorgio in February 1990, becoming its
chairperson, president, and chief executive officer. Also during
this time, he became chairperson and chief executive officer of
Bally Manufacturing Corp., the casino and health-club operator. Di
Giorgio's headquarters were moved from San Francisco to Somerset,
New Jersey, the base for Goldberg's investment partnerships. Of Di
Giorgio's remaining five divisions, all except White Rose were sold
by 1994.
Early that year a competitor, the Fleming Companies, Inc. of
Oklahoma City, indicated that it had signed a letter of intent to
sell most of the assets of its Royal Foods dairy and delicatessen
products business in Woodbridge, New Jersey, to Di Giorgio. Terms
were not disclosed. This operation had revenues of about $300
million in 1993, bringing Di Giorgio's combined annual revenue to
about $1.1 billion.